Dear Gov. Newsom: Their daughter’s been swallowed by California’s rehab monster

Second in a regular series. See the first letter to Newsom here.

Dear Gov. Newsom:

Today I’d like you to meet the Jersey couple who parachute into L.A. every few months to figure out if their daughter is still alive.

That’s them, near Skid Row, doggedly tacking up “missing person” posters and showing her photo to whoever will listen. She’s movie star material, truly: Early 20s, long dark hair, sky high cheekbones, Brooke Shields eyebrows. “PLEASE,” the posters implore; “Contact your family. They love you.”

Dad sort of looks like a cop, but users smoke dope right in front of him and try to sell to him anyway. “I can bring back a shopping bag full of stuff,” he says. “There’s a school nearby, and little kids walk right past these guys with torches heating up these little glass vials. I took pictures.

“I’ve been in Camden and Newark, and I can’t believe how bad California is,” he adds. “You don’t see anything like this in New Jersey.”

Back in the car, Mom and Dad drive slowly, searching. So many homeless people camped out here, on the streets, in the parking lots. If they saw her, here, would they even recognize her?

Mom and Dad know their girl was last spotted near here because they still have phone numbers for the “friends” who first lured her to private-pay addiction treatment in California. Those guys — they’re almost always guys — tell them where to look. It’s sad, really: “I wish my Mom and Dad would look for me,” these “friends” have said. “They don’t even want to know where I am.”

Those guys aren’t always so sensitive. We’re not identifying the family by name because they fear physical reprisal from the people who brokered their daughter to California.

You’re wondering how, exactly, a family winds up like this. Suffice to say that, almost universally, these stories start with trauma — the details are unimportant for our purposes today — and substance use becomes a way to cope with, rebel against, escape that trauma. But addiction treatment, as it exists in this notoriously corrupt, non-medical, insurance-money-fueled, lightly regulated slice of California’s health care market, often leaves folks worse off than when they started. It leaves some of them dead.

“These young people, most of them are under 30, I feel bad for all of them,” Mom says. “I feel bad they got turned on to the drugs — yes, some of it is choice — but I also feel they were taken advantage of.”

Indeed. Their daughter was in college in Florida when she first encountered the dastardly “Florida Shuffle.” She was the golden ticket, Mom explains: Double-covered by Dad’s excellent health insurance plan, and eagerly courted by rehabs that would bill tens of thousands of dollars for her “treatment.” No real progress on sobriety required! Patients often get a cut of that insurance payout — very small by comparison — but enough to buy, say, more drugs when the time is right.

Unfortunately, Gov. Newsom, it’s the California Shuffle now. The way the system’s set up, there’s no money in actually getting people sober. So when folks complete the standard 30-, 60-, 90-day treatment cycle that insurers cover — detox, residential, outpatient — the only way rehab operators can make more money is to start the cycle again.

That’s when patients are encouraged to score drugs and use — often by the people allegedly trying to get them sober.

Prosecutors actually accused one rehab operator’s minions of injecting methamphetamine into the neck of a prospective patient so the patient would test positive and be eligible for detox treatment, the most expensive kind. (The CEO of that operation died of a fentanyl overdose while charges were pending, but that’s another story.)

Anyway, the Jersey couple’s college girl bounced from rehab to rehab in Florida — “marketed and manipulated,” her parents call it — until her fine insurance benefits scored her a bounce to less-humid, more beautiful California. “Marketed and trafficked,” Mom says. Their girl bounced from rehab to rehab here, too, cycling in and out, until the insurance benefits ran dry.

That’s when — with no money, no job, no ticket home — she wound up on the mean streets. Using. Meth. And heroin. And fentanyl. “Smoking fentanyl non-stop,” Mom says.

“For people in our situation, who have loved ones, how do you find a decent detox, rehab, whatever, for your family member, when the insurance company doesn’t even know who’s really legit or not?” Mom asks.

“We foolishly went to one or two that talked the talk. These marketers, they train them, they can answer questions with the best of them. You believe them.”

Gov. Newsom, California isn’t making this any easier. We can look up, online, state inspection reports and citations for licensed child care providers and licensed group homes — but California’s licensed addiction treatment information is locked away in a vault. We’ve waited four, five months to get heavily-redacted public records about a single provider. People in crisis just don’t have that kind of time.

Mom and Dad keep driving, squinting at the knots of people, scanning faces. There’s a little gasp. “There she is!” Mom says, heart rising and falling all at the same time.

Dad pulls into a parking lot, jumps out of the car and approaches the group. Yep, that’s her.

She’s gotten so thin. Seems so rattled. Her mouth drops open a little when she registers who she’s looking at.

“How’d you find me?” she says.

“I can always find you,” he says. “When I don’t hear from you for four, five months, I’m going to find you.”

She hugs him. She seems nervous, in front of all these people.

“Come home,” he says.

“No,” she says. “If I come home, you’re going to sit on me.”

“No,” he says. “But you’re going to get help.”

The others watch closely, defensively, a bit menacing. He thinks about grabbing her and putting her into the car whether she wants to go or not. But she’s legally an adult now. Can you kidnap your own daughter?

He asks if she’s hungry, if she wants something to eat. Not now, she says. But tomorrow. They make plans to meet at 1 p.m. the next day.

Mom and Dad return to their hotel. This is so damn hard. It would help, Mom says, if her actions had real consequences, but they don’t in California. Voters decided that drug offenders need treatment, not jail time, which sounds great on paper. But what happens if drug offenders just decide not to go to treatment? Or if the treatment itself is nonsense?

Here are some stunning stats for you, Gov. Newsom:

In 2013, there were 137,125 arrests for felony drug offenses in California, and 4,423 overdose deaths.